A comparative study of the use of powder X-ray diffraction, Raman and near infrared spectroscopy for quantification of binary polymorphic mixtures of piracetam.

Diffraction and spectroscopic methods were evaluated for quantitative analysis of binary powder mixtures of FII(6.403) and FIII(6.525) piracetam. The two polymorphs of piracetam could be distinguished using powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), Raman and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. The results demonstrated that Raman and NIR spectroscopy are most suitable for quantitative analysis of this polymorphic mixture. When the spectra are treated with the combination of multiplicative scatter correction (MSC) and second derivative data pretreatments, the partial least squared (PLS) regression model gave a root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) of 0.94 and 0.99%, respectively. FIII(6.525) demonstrated some preferred orientation in PXRD analysis, making PXRD the least preferred method of quantification.